Top tools for platform engineering teams to manage uptime

Platform engineering teams manage uptime with one tool per layer: observability to see problems, synthetic and uptime checks to catch them from the outside, SLOs to decide which ones matter, incident response and on-call to act on them, status pages to tell users, a service catalog to know who owns what, and infrastructure as code to make all of it a paved road for every team. Rootly is the incident response and on-call layer: it takes alerts from every other layer, pages the owner, runs the incident in Slack, Microsoft Teams or Google Chat, publishes the status page and drives the retrospective.

Most uptime problems platform teams inherit are gaps between tools: an alert with no owner, an outage nobody announced, a fix that never got a ticket. This guide lists the tools teams use in each layer and how the layers connect.

The platform engineering uptime stack

Layer	What it does	Common tools	Connects to Rootly
Observability	Metrics, logs and traces; alerts on symptoms	Datadog, Grafana with Prometheus, New Relic, Dynatrace, Honeycomb, Chronosphere	Yes, as alert sources
Synthetic and uptime checks	Tests endpoints and user flows from outside	Checkly, synthetics in Datadog or New Relic	Checkly as an alert source
SLOs	Error budgets that decide what pages	Nobl9, observability SLO features	Nobl9 integration
Incident response and on-call	Pages the owner, runs the incident, drives follow-up	Rootly	—
Status pages	Tells customers and internal teams what is happening	Rootly Status Pages (included with Incident Response)	Built in
Service catalog	Who owns which service	Backstage, Cortex, ServiceNow	Yes, native catalog sync
Infrastructure as code	Makes the stack repeatable	Terraform, Pulumi	Terraform provider and Pulumi
Change tracking	Shows what changed before an incident	GitHub, GitLab, CI pipelines, Kubernetes	Pulses from CI, Kubernetes and the API

Observability

Observability is where most uptime signals start. Datadog, Grafana with Prometheus, New Relic, Dynatrace, Honeycomb and Chronosphere all cover metrics and alerting; the choice usually follows cost, data volume and whether the team prefers a hosted suite or open source. Whatever you pick, alert on user-facing symptoms such as error rate and latency, and send alerts with service and environment tags so they can be routed. Rootly ingests alerts from each of these, including Datadog, and Kubernetes cluster events.

Synthetic and uptime checks

Internal metrics can look healthy while users can’t log in. Synthetic checks test endpoints and real user flows from outside your network on a schedule. Checkly runs browser and API checks as code; observability suites offer their own synthetics. Route check failures into the same on-call flow as every other alert, so an outside-in failure pages the same owner.

SLOs

Service level objectives decide which alerts deserve a page. An error-budget burn alert pages when users are actually being hurt at a rate that matters, instead of on every spike. Nobl9 and the SLO features in observability tools track this; Rootly’s Nobl9 integration brings SLO signals into the response flow. See incident metrics for the numbers to track alongside SLOs.

Incident response and on-call

This is the layer that turns signals into action. Rootly’s On-Call holds schedules and escalation policies and pages by push, phone, SMS, email, Slack and Microsoft Teams. Rootly Incident Response opens a channel per incident in Slack, Microsoft Teams or Google Chat, assigns roles, starts a video bridge, records the timeline, creates Jira or Linear tickets, and drafts the retrospective with AI. Alert grouping, deduplication and urgency keep the pager quiet for noise; see tools to reduce false-positive alerts.

For a platform team, the deciding factor is how much of this other teams get by default. Rootly ships starter templates and opinionated defaults, so a team runs its first incident in about 15 minutes and most teams are live within a week, while workflows, forms and severities stay configurable for teams that need more.

Status pages

Customers find out about an outage from the status page, so it should update from the incident itself. If posting an update means opening a second tool, it gets skipped at 3 a.m. Rootly Status Pages are included with Incident Response and publish from the incident in Slack or the web app, with password or SAML protection for internal pages.

Service catalog

Routing by service only works when the catalog says who owns each service. Backstage, Cortex and ServiceNow are the common choices, and Rootly syncs services and teams from each natively. Other systems of record connect through the Catalog Sync CLI, and teams without a catalog can keep one in Rootly. The owner in the catalog becomes the escalation policy that gets paged.

Infrastructure as code

Define services, owners, on-call schedules, escalation policies, alert routes and incident workflows in Terraform or Pulumi, so a new service gets the full uptime stack from one module. See on-call as code for a worked example.

Change tracking

Deploys, flag flips and config changes are where many incidents start, so send them to the incident tool where responders will see them first. In Rootly these arrive as pulses from CI pipelines, the API, the CLI and Kubernetes, and show up on the incident for the affected services.

How platform teams roll out Rootly

Platform teams usually connect their observability and uptime tools as alert sources, sync the catalog, define on-call and workflows in Terraform, and publish a default incident process that every product team inherits. Integrations, the Terraform provider, the API and the MCP server are included on every plan; see pricing. For the full list of integrations to plan for, see must-have integrations for incident management software.